THE HOUSE ON THE BORDERLAND

AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION TO THE MANUSCRIPT

Many are the hours in which I have pondered upon the story that is set
forth in the following pages. I trust that my instincts are not awry
when they prompt me to leave the account, in simplicity, as it was
handed to me.

And the MS. itself--You must picture me, when first it was given into my
care, turning it over, curiously, and making a swift, jerky examination.
A small book it is; but thick, and all, save the last few pages, filled
with a quaint but legible handwriting, and writ very close. I have the
queer, faint, pit-water smell of it in my nostrils now as I write, and
my fingers have subconscious memories of the soft, "cloggy" feel of the
long-damp pages.

I read, and, in reading, lifted the Curtains of the Impossible that
blind the mind, and looked out into the unknown. Amid stiff, abrupt
sentences I wandered; and, presently, I had no fault to charge against
their abrupt tellings; for, better far than my own ambitious phrasing,
is this mutilated story capable of bringing home all that the old
Recluse, of the vanished house, had striven to tell.

Of the simple, stiffly given account of weird and extraordinary matters,
I will say little. It lies before you. The inner story must be uncovered,
personally, by each reader, according to ability and desire. And even
should any fail to see, as now I see, the shadowed picture and conception
of that to which one may well give the accepted titles of Heaven and Hell;
yet can I promise certain thrills, merely taking the story as a story.

WILLIAM HOPE HODGSON December 17, 1907



_I_

THE FINDING OF THE MANUSCRIPT

Right away in the west of Ireland lies a tiny hamlet called Kraighten.
It is situated, alone, at the base of a low hill. Far around there
spreads a waste of bleak and totally inhospitable country; where, here
and there at great intervals, one may come upon the ruins of some long
desolate cottage--unthatched and stark. The whole land is bare and
unpeopled, the very earth scarcely covering the rock that lies beneath
it, and with which the country abounds, in places rising out of the soil
in wave-shaped ridges.

Yet, in spite of its desolation, my friend Tonnison and I had elected to
spend our vacation there. He had stumbled on the place by mere chance
the year previously, during the course of a long walking tour, and
discovered the possibilities for the angler in a small and unnamed river
that runs past the outskirts of the little village.

I have said that the river is without name; I may add that no map that I
have hitherto consulted has shown either village or stream. They seem
to have entirely escaped observation: indeed, they might never exist for
all that the average guide tells one. Possibly this can be partly
accounted for by the fact that the nearest railway station (Ardrahan) is
some forty miles distant.